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tossandthrowyesterday at 4:47 PM6 repliesview on HN

You are very strong on the "slop" bias. Why?

In managing a large to enterprise sized code base, I experience the opposite. I can guarantee a much more homogenous quality of the code base.

It is the opposite of slop I am seeing. And that at a lower cost.

Today,I literally made a large and complex migration of all of our endpoints. Took ai 30 minutes, including all frontends using these endpoints. Works flawlessly, debt principal down.


Replies

chapsyesterday at 4:51 PM

Which company do you work at so we can avoid your migrated endpoints?

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apsurdyesterday at 4:55 PM

One point: yes, you're speaking from the power position. God-mode over a fleet of minions has always been an engineer's wet-dream. That's not even bad per-say. It's the collateral damage down stream that's at issue. Maybe you don't see any damage, but that's largely the point. Is it really up to you to say?

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skeeter2020yesterday at 6:58 PM

>> Works flawlessly, debt principal down.

I don't doubt it completed the initial coding work in a short time, but the fact that you've equated that with flawless execution is on the concerning-scary spectrum. I can only assume you're talking "compiles-runs-ship it"

The danger is not generating obvious slop, it's accepting decent and convincing outputs as complete and absolving ourselves of responsibility.

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peterbell_nycyesterday at 5:18 PM

Seeing plenty of this. The quality of agentic code is a function of the quantity and quality of adversarial quality gates. I have seen no proof that an agentic system is incapable of delivering code that is as functional, performant and maintainable as code from a great team of developers, and enough anecdotes in the other direction to suggest that AI "slop" is going to be a problem that teams with great harnesses will be solving fairly soon if they haven't already.

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hliyanyesterday at 4:57 PM

> Today, I literally made a large and complex migration of all of our endpoints. Took ai 30 minutes, including all frontends using these endpoints. Works flawlessly, debt principal down.

This is either a very remarkable or a very frightening statement. You're claiming flawless execution within the same day as the change.

If you're unable to tell us which product this is, can you at least commit to report back in a month as to how well this actually went?

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bluecheese452yesterday at 5:54 PM

Ironically the post saying it is not slop sounds exactly like ai slop.

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